Torrefaction

Huffington Post has a slide show of writers who were "late bloomers," i.e. started writing later in life.  Of course I clicked over to it for some encouragement, since my writing tends to be stalled most of the time but I have hopes of publishing something someday.  So it seems that publishing your first book at 37 or 38 makes you a late bloomer.  Oh. Well, I guess I can't actually disagree with that. Apparently I have missed the late-bloomer train already, and I will have to continue to cling to Grandma Moses as a role model.

I have a story about a monster who eats people. Well, it's about the people, who then band together to kill said monster and eat him.  I've been thinking of this as a fantasy story, because it's essentially a pretty traditional dragon story.  Except there is not actually a dragon; it's a different monster.  And there are some fairly stabby bits, and people are woeful at times about all the death.  Is a fantasy with a lot of woe and stabbing maybe a dark fantasy or horror-ish fantasy?  I'm not ready to sub it yet (since half of it is still in my brain instead of on paper) but I'm wondering if I should try some of the horror-ish venues first instead of sending it to a bunch of fantasy editors who will think it's nasty.

I am also thinking my satire about a shop where you go to commit suicide neatly might also be more welcome at horror-ish venues than the SF/F places I've been sending it, but I know nothing about horror fiction (because it's scary, and I scare easily) so I dunno.

Thoughts?

So, Mike had cleared a big chunk of time this weekend so he could watch Charlie on his own and I could go to Wiscon for a day. Since I'm not going, most of that day is available for re-purposing.  Mike's going to watch Charlie on his own for 6 + hours tomorrow while I drive a couple suburbs away, to a very nice library that has tiny private rooms with desks in them.  I am going to print out drafts and notes from the three stories that have been stuck in my mental queue since early 2009 (when the group project I had been writing for went kablooey), and I am going to put new batteries in my Alphasmart, and by gum I am going to draft those three stories, end-to-end.

Ferghal's Fall:  about a very hungry god, and his dwindling supply of worshippers
The Dig:  about an archaeological dig, and the personal secrets it turns up
Career Girl: a retro tale about a 1920's career girl trying to decide if she should accept a marriage proposal. Also, aliens attack.

They're all complete in my head....I just have to extract them.

Sometime I would like to see a group of characters in an SF novel sit down and have a meal that doesn't consist mainly of giant barbequed hunks of exposition. It's like there's a rule: if an author wants to have someone deliver a tedious speech explaining how the in-story government, water plant, or FTL drive works, it's copacetic as long as everybody's eating.


(Why yes, I *am* reading Heinlein at the moment!)

Potatoes actually come in a wide variety of colors:



Except when they don't:




Comparison inspired by this, via james_nicoll  and ktempest .  Scroll down to Paul Di Filippo's comment in which he discusses potatoes and corn and Sonic Youth.

Icons forthcoming.

I subbed "It's Your Funeral" to Clarkesworld. They say they respond within a few days, awesome! So I can keep the rejections coming in at a good clip.

So far, it's been rejected by F&SF, Strange Horizons, and Futurismic. Weird Tales sat on it for a while, then closed their submissions and bounced it unread. 

I also have a rejection from Glimmer Train in the pile, for a different story called Fratricide. I have no idea where to sub that one next, because I know fuckall about lit-fic markets, because I mostly hate lit fic. Except when I write it, don'ch'a know.

More, more! Bring on the rejections!  What I said a while back, about how the awfulness of the adoption process makes story rejections feel okay by comparison?  So far, it is holding true.

I'm writing a story with a telepath in it, and I find myself falling back on the parameters set by other treatments of telepathy - proximity-based effect, touch-based effect, inhuman characters (vamps, androids) aren't readable, it's hard for telepaths to be comfortable around other people, etc.  I generally try to do something new with tired old concepts, but on this one my muse is just being damn lazy.

So I've gotten as far as realizing that having a teep character feel more relaxed around someone inhuman whose mind she can't read is straight outta Sookie-Stackhouse-land and has to go.  And I'm guarding against totally ripping off the paramaters of telepathy from Babylon 5 The Demolished Man. But my thinkpan is probably full of other telepath ideas that I may not know are overused or unoriginal. 

So, internets, wanna help me out?  What are some telepath clichés? Which ones are particularly tiresome?

So I have 4 stories in various stages of work, and I'm not in the mood to work on any of them.  Unlike many (most?) other writers, I only write when I feel like it, so I produce very little, but I don't have angst (I used to try to do BIC and wordcounts and stuff, and that just contributed to my writers block).

-One story is almost done, but it may be too personal to show in public, so meh, I am not motivated.

-One story's first draft is almost done, but I have to change the title and name of a central character because it turns out someone in SFF fandom has the same rather unusual name.  Since the character in question gets killed and eaten it might be taken the wrong way, otherwise . However, I really like the name in that context.  Also I'm not sure the startup venue that I was writing the story for is a going concern.  Meh, not motivated.

-One story is a traditional whiz-bang about aliens attacking in the 1920's, except feminist (the story not the aliens), and I've got all the plot points and some of the dialogue worked out, but I need to do research to make sure I write a proper story about a 1920's architecture firm. Research? Meh. 

-One story is a complex elegy about failing relationships, archaeology, and the lies of history. I have it mostly worked out in my head but parts of it are not ripe, and I cannot write unripe stories. Meh.

-Of course there's also a novel, but let's not even go there.

A proper procrastinator would start an entirely NEW story, but I think I'll just let them all percolate while I spend my designated weekly "me time"* playing video games.


*Mike and I each take a half-day or so every weekend to do something fun for ourselves while the other one hangs out with the baby, as long as everyone's healthy. Ah, precious sanity time.

Anyone know a good SF-short-story venue for a satire about suicide & empathy?  It's been rejected by F&SF, Futurismic, and Strange Horizons so far.  I have a whopping 2 finished stories that I'm willing to have in circulation and right now neither of them is subbed anywhere (the other one is lit-fic, and I'm probably not going to try very hard to place it).